The quote, taken from a
web site promoting a late 1990s video edition of the film released originally in 1958,
is misleading, both in the catchy diction employed and in the use of glaring
colors. Though Thunder Road is insistently a black-and-white film,
the prose of the promotional hardly does justice to the movie.
The cult status attributed was above all a regional phenomenon, confined
almost exclusively to Appalachia. Nick Clooney recalls in a Cincinnati Post
obituary for Mitchum, “In that part of the world, Thunder
Road was Gone With The Wind wrapped in Citizen Kane. Some
film historians now grudgingly call it a ‘cult favorite.’ But when it
was released, it wasn’t a cult that made Thunder Road a hit, unless
you want to call large sections of Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia,
Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia and Alabama a ‘cult.’ In
that region, it was a flat-out blockbuster.”

Clooney goes on: “Perhaps those in other parts of the country won’t
understand. A case could be made that it was just another modest mountain
morality tale. But its theme—and its theme song [i.e., “Ballad of
Thunder Road”]—resonated off those dark, brooding hills as few movies
have, ever. Robert Mitchum liked the movie too. He loved music, he loved
to sing and he loved to write songs. He wrote the title song and it was he
who sang, ‘The law they swore they’d get him, but the devil got him
first’ as the credits rolled. For those who haven’t seen [the film],
the subject is cliched. Moonshine, fast cars, mob moving in on a family
business and revenue agents. What made this one different was Robert
Mitchum. In those days few experts acknowledged what is now clear. Robert
Mitchum was a great film actor. Not many filled the screen with as much
presence and magnetism. That’s what he brought to Thunder Road.
As a measure of the ‘legs’ this picture had in the Southeast, Robert
Mitchum’s recording of the title song spent 11 weeks on Billboard’s
hit parade when the movie came out in 1958, then spent another 10 weeks on
the chart in 1962! I doubt if it sold many records in New York or Los
Angeles, but it was number one in Harlan and Jellico.”

Viewed
from a less compulsively regional angle, Thunder Road is an enduring example of Americana in the depiction of the rural upper South, its
car culture, the roads and roadsides. “Robert Mitchum plays Luke Doolin, the elder son of an Appalachian family which
supplements its meagre income by making and selling illegal liquor. The
Doolins and the other local families involved in this trade have two enemies to worry about: the US Treasury Department
and the big city crime syndicate, which is determined to wrest
control of the lucrative business from the country-folk. The place of
confrontation is the road. On the surface
then, Thunder Road is a straightforward thriller. Beneath its cut-price
surface, between the lines of its plot, it
also tells another story” (David Downing).

That other story between the lines of the plot
comes to the fore in an abundance of dark greys which dominate the screen
as the camera focuses largely on Luke Doolin. The veteran of the Korean (?) war has
seen a fair share of the world at large, its big cities and ways of life;
he knows that before long the secluded space his kin have inhabited will
be overrun as the mountain folk will not be able to bar or withstand the violent invasion
of progress and civilization. All men figuring in the movie are crooks in one way
or another, and
compared to the revenue men and the mobsters, the moonshiners of Sorrowful
Mountain, though pursuing unlawful activities as they eke out a living, are really the good guys,
even if they are doomed to surrender in the end to the encroachment of
big-world civilization. Luke has submitted himself to the traditional ways
because he knows he is the best when it comes to running illegal booze, but he will not
have his kid brother (acted by James Mitchum, Robert’s son) follow in his steps; and when the mobsters trick the kid brother into
attempting a run on his own, Luke takes his place. A conscious act of self
sacrifice prevents the boy’s making a fatal mistake.